Matthew 18: 21-35 (read 21,22)<\/p>\n
Leonardo Da Vinci was a great painter, engineer, draftsman and thinker.\u00a0 The story is told that before he painted the LAST SUPPER, he had a violent argument with a fellow painter.\u00a0 Davinci was so mad that he decided to paint the face of his enemy into the face of Judas Iscariot, Jesus’ betrayer.\u00a0 He painted it in so everyone could recognize him.<\/p>\n
But when he came to paint the face of Jesus, he couldn’t do it.\u00a0 Something seemed to hold back the best efforts of this skilled painter.\u00a0 Do you know what it was? Davinci did.\u00a0 It was the face of his enemy that he painted in anger.\u00a0 So Davinci painted out the face of Judas and started again with the face of Jesus.\u00a0 This time he succeeded.<\/p>\n
You see, you cannot paint the face of Jesus into your life , while you paint the face of another with hatred and an ugly refusal to forgive.\u00a0 To follow Jesus is to forgive our neighbor.\u00a0 And in this parable, Jesus comes with a compelling reason.<\/p>\n
FORGIVE AS YOU HAVE BEEN FORGIVEN<\/p>\n
I. See the mercy of your King<\/p>\n
II.\u00a0 Have mercy on one another.<\/p>\n
Jesus had just finished explaining how we are to forgive that person who sins against us and repents.\u00a0 That made Peter wonder.\u00a0 How often? He may have thought to himself.\u00a0 There needs to some kind of limit.\u00a0 Otherwise people will take advantage<\/em>. So Peter asked Jesus this question that you or I might have asked:\u00a0 \u201cLord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?\u201d<\/span> Peter thought he was being generous because the Jewish writings teach no more than three.<\/p>\n Jesus answer must have shocked Peter and the others.\u00a0 But he doesn\u2019t stop there.\u00a0 Our good Lord and Teacher draws us in with this parable.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 23 <\/sup>\u201cTherefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants<\/span>. As Jesus tells it, this was a king who obviously gave his servants a lot of responsibility for his treasury.\u00a0 Big sums of money passed through their hands.\u00a0 24 <\/span><\/sup>As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.<\/span><\/p>\n In todays terms, the servant owed his king, millions of dollars.\u00a0 Millions of dollars he could not repay.\u00a0 The only thing he could do was get down on his knees and beg for more time.\u00a0 Yet this was nothing but an act of desperation.\u00a0 For this was a debt he could never hope to repay.<\/p>\n It’s pretty obvious where Jesus is taking us here.\u00a0 The King is the Lord and Peter, the disciples you and I \u00a0are the servant.\u00a0 We owed a tremendous debt to our King.<\/p>\n Have you ever heard of the Bureau of Public Debt?\u00a0 It keeps track of how much debt our Federal Government has accumulated.\u00a0 I check it just the other day.\u00a0 Our country’s debt was this:<\/p>\n $14, 865,329, 647,749.39<\/p>\n On some web sites, that number changes before you in real time.\u00a0 It shocks you. Right before you, each minute, each hour that debt increases\u00a0 not by hundreds but by millions.<\/p>\n Well just imagine there was a website with your name on it that gave a constant read out.\u00a0 So that each time you sinned, each time you lost your patience, each time you failed to love , each time you were arrogant or gossiped or put someone or something before the Lord, the total went up. Just imagine the number, our personal debt of sin that we could never repay.<\/p>\n But what are we told about our King?\u00a0 This King had every right to lower the boom on this man.\u00a0 Yet what did he do?\u00a0 He took pity on this helpless man.\u00a0 His heart went out to him.\u00a0 And he did more than give his servant more time.\u00a0 Instead, he erased the debt from his books.\u00a0 He absorbed the loss.\u00a0 In effect, he paid the man’s debt himself.<\/p>\n This is your King, dear friends.\u00a0 This is your God.\u00a0 He’s paid our debt,\u00a0 hasn’t he?\u00a0 But in our case, it took more than the stroke of a pen. It took more, much more to erase our monstrous debt of guilt that condemned us. \u00a0\u00a0It took a payment like no other – the suffering and death of God’s one and only Son for you.\u00a0 The Lord laid on him the guilt of us all.<\/span> See the mercy of your King. <\/strong><\/p>\n Think about it.\u00a0 God’s Word says this about Jesus in Colossians 1: 16,17.\u00a0 By him, all things were created…He is before all things and by him all things hold together<\/span>.\u00a0 Yet this King, who created the universe, this King of kings, bowed his head in shame to wear a crown of thorns for you and me.\u00a0 This King who’s got the whole world in his hands, stretched out his hands on a cross for you. For there he took our debt on himself and paid an awful price. \u00a0So that now he says to you in this Word.\u00a0 He says to you through his called servant.\u00a0 Take heart, my son.\u00a0 Take heart my daughter.\u00a0 Your sins are forgiven.<\/em> Even those who memory troubles you now.\u00a0 \u00a0Look at the cross and see the mercy of your King.<\/strong><\/p>\n But Jesus is not done with us here.\u00a0 God intends his mercy his forgiveness to have an effect on us.\u00a0 People who have experienced God’s forgiveness are to be forgiving people.\u00a0 We are to be like Joseph in our Old Testament lesson.\u00a0 His brothers had sold him into slavery.\u00a0 They had broken their father’s heart by telling him that his son\u00a0 was eaten by wild animals.\u00a0 But when the time came when Joseph had the\u00a0 power to get revenge on his brothers, what did he do?\u00a0 Mercy welled up in his heart and he forgave them.\u00a0 Mercy that Joseph had experienced in the LORD.\u00a0 So have you.\u00a0 More than you can know. So forgive as you have been forgiven<\/strong>. See the mercy of your King and then have mercy on one another<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What a sad, pathetic example we have in this servant.\u00a0 Jesus intentionally makes it sound outrageous. No sooner than he was forgiven, no sooner released from his terrible debt, he goes out.\u00a0 He finds his fellow servant who owed him very little.<\/p>\n Yet he takes him by the throat and demands:\u00a0 Pay back what you owe me.<\/span> The servant begs for more time just like he did.\u00a0 But he gets a much different response.\u00a0 Not mercy, not pity, not forgiveness. This servant who was forgiven so much could not bring himself to forgive very little. Instead he has the man thrown in prison.<\/p>\n This servant betrayed a terrible ingratitude, didn’t he?\u00a0 His king expected much better from him.\u00a0 \u2018You wicked servant,\u2019 he said, \u2018I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. 33 <\/sup>Shouldn\u2019t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you? <\/span>This servant betrayed a terrible ingratitude and so do we, so do we when we refuse to forgive someone from our heart.\u00a0 So do we when we hold that grudge, refusing to let it go.\u00a0 We betray a terrible ingratitude to God.<\/p>\n For what are we called upon to forgive?\u00a0 Most of the time little things like that remark that hurts our feelings.\u00a0 But even when it is something that hurts deep down like Joseph’s brothers, here’s the point.\u00a0 It doesn’t even come close to what the Lord has forgiven you. There’s just no comparison.\u00a0 There’s just no comparison when you look up to your Savior’s cross and see his face contorted in pain. \u00a0There’s no comparison to what you have been forgiven and the price God paid to make it so.<\/p>\n So look there.\u00a0 Look to God’s mercy and forgiveness for you and find the power to forgive.\u00a0 Find the power to put that hurt away.\u00a0 Find the power to forgive not just once or twice, but again and again as Jesus told \u00a0Peter.<\/p>\n Back in 1946 when Germany was decimated, a certain young man joined a gang.\u00a0 The gang went through the country side stealing whatever they could, showing no mercy.\u00a0 One night on an isolated farm, they \u00a0gunned down ten members of the Wilhelm Hammelman<\/strong> family.\u00a0 All of them died except one man who survived four gunshot wounds.<\/p>\n Twenty years went by, The once young gang member had finished his prison term.\u00a0 “But the state would not release him because he had nowhere to go.\u00a0 Do you know what Mr Hammelman did when he learned of his situation.\u00a0 He asked the authorities to release the man to his custody.\u00a0 This is what he wrote in his request.\u00a0 Christ died for my sins and forgave me. Should I not forgive this man?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n We know the answer.\u00a0 We find it here . Forgive as you have been forgiven<\/strong>.\u00a0 Amen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Matthew 18: 21-35 (read 21,22) Leonardo Da Vinci was a great painter, engineer, draftsman and thinker.\u00a0 The story is told that before he painted the LAST SUPPER, he had a violent argument with a fellow painter.\u00a0 Davinci was so mad that he decided to paint the face of his enemy into the face of Judas Iscariot, Jesus’ betrayer.\u00a0 He painted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":282,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.livingwordpetaluma.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}